https://nyti.ms/2GjaIjp
Not quite origami, but thought many list members would find this article in the New York Times, about Donald Knuth, famous computer scientist and author of the seminal computer science book The Art of Computer Programming <https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html>, interesting. The article mentions Martin and Erik Demaine and their mathematical origami designs for how to fold paper and linkages <http://erikdemaine.org/folding/> into different shapes. NYTimes article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-algorithms-programming.html or here: https://nyti.ms/2GjaIjp Excerpt from article: One section of his book is titled, “Puzzles Versus the Real World.” He emailed an excerpt to the father-son team of Martin Demaine, an artist, and Erik Demaine, a computer scientist, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because Dr. Knuth had included their “algorithmic puzzle fonts <http://erikdemaine.org/fonts/>.” “I was thrilled,” said Erik Demaine. “It’s an honor to be in the book.” He mentioned another Knuth quotation, which serves as the inspirational motto for the biannual “FUN with Algorithms <http://www2.idsia.ch/cms/fun16/>” conference: “Pleasure has probably been the main goal all along.” But then, Dr. Demaine said, the field went and got practical. Engineers and scientists and artists are teaming up to solve real-world problems — protein folding, robotics, airbags — using the Demaines’s mathematical origami designs for how to fold paper and linkages <http://erikdemaine.org/folding/> into different shapes. Yaacov Metzger